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what real leadership looks like
Saturday, September 3 2005
After manually setting some of the new electrically-controlled valves, I fired up the boiler so we'd have our first hot water in over a week (we've been living mostly without hot water since the worst of the summer heat waves). Happily, the system worked and cold water was made hot, just the way it was back in the day. This might seem like a trivial test, but for me it was important; it means that even if my solar heating system is a complete failure, at least the old system is still functional.
My plumbing work was interrupted by a household cleaning jihad in anticipation of guests from Brooklyn. There'd been no vacuuming in over a month (I know this because the vacuum cleaner has had a broken belt during this time) and it's amazing the amount of crap that can accumulate, particularly in the places where the treads meet the risers on a carpeted staircase. In this house that crap is comprised mostly of animal hair, though mats of it look superficially like dust bunnies. Then again, dust bunnies themselves are comprised mostly of hair and fibers derived from fabric.
I managed to figure out where to drill the holes necessary to run the two 3/4 inch copper pipes up from the boiler room into the first floor office, which is the only living space these pipes will pass through on their way to the laboratory. By the late afternoon I had the pipes rising about three feet above the floor, fully soldered in place. There must have been a slow leak in one of the electrically-controlled valves because after several hours one of these pipes had filled to the brim with water.
This evening our friends David the Rabbi and his wife Lynn showed up for a couple days of vacation in Hurley. Gretchen made one of her classic pizza dinners and we all ate it out on the south deck. A little autumnal chill was in the air so we all wore jackets or sweaters, though I remained barefoot, my preferred footware since early April.
David told a story about the time he was climbing down from his Brooklyn roof deck and a bottle of concentrated pomegranate juice slipped out from under his arm: bounce, bounce, bounce, smash! It sprayed sticky blood-colored fluid everywhere, each spatter potentially armed with tiny shards of broken glass. It took an hour and a half to clean up the disaster and they're still finding glass and dried blobs of pomegranate juice. "But it could have been worse," Gretchen was quick to note, "you could have been carrying a bag of diarrhea down the ladder and it could have slipped out of your arms and exploded." "Yeah," I agreed, "then your place would have a little of what everyone is dealing with down in New Orleans. They're basting in diarrhea pretty much."
This led into a long discussion about how the Bush Administration "has really fucked up this time" (and how many times have we said that?). We talked about the failures of ineptly-run limited government, and how fired lawyers for Arab horse showing organizations don't necessarily make for competent directors of bureaucracies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency. We talked about Bush's tardy appearance on the scene, and the inappropriateness of the small talk he made while touring the disaster. It seemed odd, we agreed, that he didn't feel the need to talk about his reckless youth when the American people were first considering him for the office of President, but now suddenly there's been a biblical disaster and he feels the need to publicly wax nostalgic about it. As an example of what the president could have done early in the disaster, David the Rabbi suggested that he could have gotten on the radio and told all the assholes with their prestige Humvees that a national emergency was upon us and they should immediately drive to New Orleans and help in the rescue and evacuation of the city. "That's what Churchill did back when the British and French troops were backed up against the sea on the Dunkirk beach, surrounded by the Nazis," I said, "Churchill called for anyone with a boat to come help with the evacuation and they did. That's what real leadership looks like."
"If this were a banana republic," I continued, "there'd be a coup against these jokers." The understanding of democracy and human rights might be imperfect in the former Soviet Union and throughout much of the third world but at least they understand when it's time for a change. How bad will it have to get here before a change finally happens?
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